This is the first in a series of blog posts called “What’s in a Name,” by my colleague Richard Pearce. After thoroughly researching, he will explain to us how plants received their common and latin names.
Let’s not quibble over words. It will be the same to me whatever name is applied.
— Carl Linnaeus, 1747
For the past few years I have been documenting the flora of the Upper Mississippi River region using an office scanner in place of a fixed-lens camera. The images are rich in detail, equivalent to what would be achieved by using a 200 megapixel close-up camera — if one existed. Scanner images can be printed up to several feet across and still carry fine details from edge to edge. Moreover, with computer profiling customized to the scanner, colors are exact.
Of course I need to know what species I’m imaging, so a modicum of research into each plant is obligatory. Today, with the resources of the Internet, this task has become greatly facilitated. Entire books, journals, and species lists with diagnostic descriptions are available online, each with searchable texts. Botanical collections, letters, and other archives can be tapped in minutes. Central to my initial investigations is finding the answer to the obvious question: How did the plant earn its name? Or to be more exact names as there will be, in addition to the “Latin” terms, a variety of common names.
New to botany, I was rather surprised by the multitude of “official” plant names and synonyms describing a single species. I had näively thought this aspect of the discipline had been taken care of long ago. But it is not unusual for even sources of authority to contradict each other. Part of the problem stems from the seemingly unbridled temptation by taxonomists to re-classify plants whose names everybody had just gotten used to. Additional constraints on conformity arise from the problem of building agreement across international borders or even among different scientific disciplines.
Ironically, a plant’s common name is oftentimes more logical than its scientific designation. The latter, if not making an historical or mythological reference, honoring a colleague, or evoking some fanciful image, might simply stand as a droll, inside joke. A serial number and a universally agreed upon cast of DNA markers would be a much surer way of grouping plants. Yet it remains everlastingly true, for Homo sapiens at any rate, that names, in addition to being easier to remember, are a lot more fun. In this series I will be sharing some standouts in plant nomenclature that have tickled this neophyte’s fancy.
To begin with, let’s look at the monkey flower, or Mimulus ringens, so named because of its resemblance to an ape — or was it?
M. ringens inhabits flood plains and stream banks throughout the upper Mississippi River basin, rooting in the damp, springy soils at the water’s edge from mid to late summer. Floral displays are conservative, with open flowers often found only on separate stems and one of an axial pair of flowers remaining as a bud until its mate has finished blooming. The beautiful lavender-blue flowers are pollinated by bees seeking nectar, but only the strongest can force their way past the closed, pale yellow throat of the corolla.
But the universally acknowledged common name for M. ringens, monkey flower, is a misnomer that has propagated through centuries of botanical literature and onto the Internet. It’s a classic case of “Say a thing often enough and it will become fact.” Informed laymen and professional botanists alike, including the revered American taxonomist Asa Gray (1810-1888), have declared that the generic name Mimulus was derived from the Greek mimo, or ape, because of the flower’s simian-like appearance.
Name from mimo, an ape, on account of the gaping corolla.
— Asa Gray, A Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States…, 1862; p 286
Nineteenth and twentieth century botanical texts regularly refer to Mimulus ringens and other Mimulus species as “monkey” flowers. Despite this chorus of agreement — unusual for the plant world — some authorities appear to be hedging a bit: (italics mine)
- Each flower purportedly resembles the face of a smiling monkey.
- Imaginative eyes see what appears to them the gaping face of a little ape.
- The flower vaguely resembles the flat, comical face of a monkey.
- The common name comes from the fancied resemblance of the flower to a monkey’s face when it is squeezed by the fingers.
I’ve looked at the flowers of Mimulus ringens from various angles, with and without finger-squeezing, and find any resemblance to a monkey to be unconvincing. What gives? A check with the source, Carl Linnaeus, shows his nomenclature made no simian inference at all.
In Philosophia Botanica (1751), Linnaeus tells us that he derived his generic term, Mimulus from mimus + personatus, Latin words meaning “masked mime”. No monkeys here! Linnaeus was referring instead to a pantomime, or a person who performs mutely (”apes”) behind a mask, for which there is a long tradition in classical and medieval times.
The English curator and publisher William Curtis (1746-1799) understood what Linnaeus was getting at:
“Mimulus mimus personatus;” in plain English, a masked mimick: … the English term Monkey flower has probably been given it, from an idea that mimulus originated from mimo a monkey …
— William Curtis The Botanical Magazine; Or, Flower-Garden Displayed, 1794
Despite Curtis’s efforts to clarify the situation, the majority of 19th and 20th century authors quickly — and erroneously — accepted monkey flower as the literal interpretation of Linnaeus’s genus designation, Mimulus.
As Curtis noted, the confusion primarily stemmed from the fact that, in Greek, mimo means ape while mimos means mime. It is from the latter that the Latin mimus originates, holding its same meaning and co-opted by Linnaeus in the 1740s. (It strains credulity to think Linnaeus mistakenly thought mimus to mean ape. For one thing his Latin was pretty good. For another, such a notion would have the flowers of Mimulus resembling “masked apes”!)
The Universal Dictionary of the English Language, edited by Robert Hunter and Charles Morris and published in 1898 also got it right:
mim-u-lus, s. [Lat. dim. of mimus (q.v.).; so named from the shape of the flowers.]
mi-mus, s. [Lat., from Gr. mimos = a mimic actor, a mime.]
Happily, over the years, everyone has agreed on the meaning of the species name. Ringens is Latin for gaping or open-mouthed. We may comfortably infer, therefore, that “a masked mime with an opened mouth” was the image Linnaeus meant to convey with his new name Mimulus. If, to us, the flower of Mimulus ringens no more resembles a mime wearing a mask with its mouth wide open than it does a monkey, it is of no consequence; it is what Linnaeus saw that counts.
Of course, “gaping masked mime” as a nickname for anything is just too cumbersome; even “mime flower” was evidently too awkward for most plant fanciers to accept and instead the more appealing if erroneous term ”monkey flower” crept into the popular and professional botanical lexicon.
One of the earliest references to “monkey flower” was in An Introduction to Botany, published in London in 1776. On page 286 is a table indicating that the “English Name” for Mimulus was “monkey flower”. The author, James Lee, claims to have extracted most of his information from Philosophia Botanica — the very book in which Linnaeus gives us the above-mentioned derivation of the genus name, Mimulus (mimus + personatus). But the inclusion of “English Names” for plants was new to this volume, added by Lee.
In contrast, other early botanical texts did not use monkey flower as a common term for Mimulus. The Universal Botanist and Nurseryman of 1772, for example, referred to Mimulus ringens as “Virginia upright mimulus” while a 1789 gardener’s handbook called it “bastard flox-glove”. Both are arguably more appropriate as common names for Mimulus than is monkey flower but neither became popular.
A still earlier English text assessed the situation candidly. The Botanist’s and Gardener’s New Dictionary published in 1763 declared that Mimulus was “a genus of plants, for which there is no English name.”
Nonetheless, Mimulus quickly, if incorrectly, became synonymous with “monkey flower” around the world. I have found no botanical publication from the 19th century to the present day that does not use monkey flower (or monkey-flower or even monkeyflower) as the common name for the genus Mimulus (there must be a few!). Curtis and the dictionary entry on mimus and mimulus excerpted above got the nomenclature right, but the latter was a non-botanical source with little influence on the plant community, while Curtis’s early entreaty was evidently not forceful enough to stop the rapidly expanding notion that Mimulus got its name because it looked like a monkey; it didn’t. [©2009 Richard Bowman Pearce]
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